Posthuman Blues

Here's an excerpt from a fairly old story I'm preparing to add to my website. Here's the URL, in case you want to take a look: www.mactonnies.com/hundredyears.html. (Contents subject to change/revision.)

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"Look," Sterope said, staring at the faux-windshield. I followed her eyes. On the horizon, the blistered, warped tresswork of a radio telescope gleamed like a spider web slashed by wind or an errant footstep. The dish itself looked wilted and charred: a diseased flower.

A blackened infrastructure surrounded us as we drove closer. Thermal bunkers protruded from the ground near the few intact antennae, glistening like Mylar as they shrugged off the impossible heat. I noted mammoth stores of liquid helium and networks of throbbing pipes. A few suited figures stalked the landscape like fat, awkward robots from a child's drawing.

Two of the figures stopped whatever they were doing and dragged a white, wrinkled modular corridor toward our car, which braked and parked neatly between two tree-sized clumps of unfathomable machinery.

"We're expected," I said, somehow less than enthusiastic. We listened to muffled snaps from outside as the corridor was attached to the car.

"We're here," Sterope said with satisfaction. She began unbuckling her coolsuit, tossing the gloves to the upholstered bench seat with a faint grimace of distaste. "We won't need the suits anymore. Go ahead; take yours off. I can't even see your face through that damned silver visor . . ."

I followed Sterope's example. The cab's gullwing door folded open as I peeled away my leggings, accidentally tearing some of the cooling ductwork. Freon leaked onto the floor like phosphorescent blood.

The door stopped short where the insulated corridor had been attached. We dashed out of the cab's back seat and over the doughy foam floor laid out before us, our arms brushing against the sagging, claustrophobic walls. Ahead of me, Sterope wore only her sarong and turban; her bare feet were silent on the cheap modular tile.

Within seconds we reached a refrigerated dome at the opposite end of the corridor. Blinking, I made out computer flatscreens, a bunk-bed, luminous starcharts that winked and pulsated with unguessable cosmic agendas.

The entrance hissed shut behind us and we were abruptly alone and vulnerable, somehow more so than we had been in the privacy of my apartment or that first encounter with the virtuality rigs. I heard the chugging of an airlock; I must have missed it in our hurry to escape the tunnel. The door reopened and two men entered, dismantling their coolsuits with practiced, unthinking ease. Both were bald and anemic-looking, with craned necks and furtive unblinking eyes that glinted phosphor-blue in the murky light. Hackers of some sort.